N.C. aircraft mechanics help Marines with helicopter shortage

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/ncwire_news/story/2741776p-9179401c.html

The Marine Corps is coping with a shortage of heavy cargo helicopters by dusting off choppers that have been mothballed in the Arizona desert for a decade and retrofitting them for service.

Civilian maintenance workers at the Naval Air Depot at the Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station this week will start cleaning and updating three shelved Navy MH-53E Sea Dragons. It could take 20 months to transform them into the Marine version of the aircraft, the Super Stallion.

The Marines have been forced into taking the extraordinary step because they have only 150 of their only heavy-lift workhorses left in their fleet. Six Super Stallions have been destroyed in crashes since 2001 and the rest are logging long hours in the air in war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"They're coasting on legacy fleets," said Richard Aboulafia, an analyst with the Teal Group, an aerospace and defense consulting company in Fairfax, Va. "They planned to coast indefinitely ... and it would have worked just fine if it hadn't been for Afghanistan and Iraq."

Marines brass ought to dump the Osprey program. Killed too many and isn't practical.

[agincourt]

1. Shows you how efficiently

600 billion a year on defense is spent. Don't even have enough cargo helicopters, my god!

[Spinzonner]

2. How dare you ...

There are the careers of top brass and future employment of political appointees that depend upon the continuation of the Osprey.

What's billions of dollars and the lives of a few Marines against that ?

:sarcasm:

[Moderator]

3. kick

[maddezmom]

4. Mothballed choppers will be updated for war

Marines are addressing shortage of heavy-lift craft by taking 3 copters out of storage.

The Associated Press

The Marine Corps is coping with a shortage of heavy cargo helicopters by dusting off choppers that have been mothballed in Tucson for a decade and retrofitting them for service.

Civilian maintenance workers at the Naval Air Depot at the Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station this week will start cleaning and updating three shelved Navy MH-53E Sea Dragons stored until last week at the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. It could take 20 months to transform them into the Marine version of the aircraft, the Super Stallion.

The Marines have been forced into taking the extraordinary step because they have only 150 of their only heavy-lift workhorses left in their fleet. Six Super Stallions have been destroyed in crashes since 2001, and the rest are logging long hours in the air in war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"They're coasting on legacy fleets," said Richard Aboulafia, an analyst with the Teal Group, an aerospace and defense consulting company in Fairfax, Va. "They planned to coast indefinitely ... and it would have worked just fine if it hadn't been for Afghanistan and Iraq."

more:http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/index.php?page=local&story_id=082205a1_marinehelicopters

[Solly Mack]

5. Is it just me or doesn't it seem that people would catch on

that with all that money spent on defense, the troops have no equipment- so the money had to go somewhere? Say, defense contractors?

Wouldn't a person begin to wonder who Bush is giving all that defense money to????

Yet his supporters don't seem to be catching on....

[sellitman]

6. Quick ...more tax cuts for the top 2%

:sarcasm:

[tuckessee]

14. Better that than...

...pouring money into the murder machine known as the US military.

[gratuitous]

7. A billion dollars a day

Every day, the United States spends more than a billion dollars on the defense budget. A billion dollars. Every day.

What are we getting for that money, besides the enmity of every other nation in the world, a bunch of dead soldiers and marines, and the windfall enrichment of defense contractors such as Halliburton, Bechtel and Custer Battles?

We're surely not spending any of that money on body armor or equipment. Where is that billion dollars going every day?

[wakeme2008]

8. The Marines are in deep shit

To be pulling these copters out of mothballs for "20 months to transform" says they do not have the equipment they need TODAY and that the Marines will be in Iraq/Iran for 20 months more.

Not a good thing to tell the boots on the ground Marines in Iraq.

[rodeodance]

11. and they raised the age limits for enlistees.

[Ezlivin]

9. That's why the V-22 is SO important

And just a few billion more dollars and additional flight-testing will get it closer to production.

:sarcasm:

http://www.g2mil.com/V-22safety.htm

[Tesha]

18. Without the V-22, we can't win the Battle of Bellboeing! (NT)

[alcibiades_mystery]

10. 300+ BILLION dollars

And the Marines are "coasting on a legacy fleet" of an important battlefield component! Where the fuck does all that money go? And who's doing the auditing? And where are the fucking staff officers in the Marine Corps?

(On a side note, I don't remember six Super Stallions being destroyed in Iraq and Afghanistan....)

[Tesha]

13. They didn't say they crashed in Afghanistan/Iraq/Iran, err, oops...

Heliopters crash during flight training and training missions too.

Tesha

[alcibiades_mystery]

16. yeah, i get that

haven't heard much on that either, though i seem to remember one super stallion going down off san diego a few years back

[DS1]

12. So they planned to coast forever, aside from actually fighting a war

How fucking dumb is that?

Everyone involved in THIS clusterfuck should be fired immediately.

[Javaman]

15. What I find interesting about this war is....

Here we have the "most powerful" military in the world with all sorts of modern geegaws, we control the skies, we can wipe out whole cities, yet, 2 1/2 years into this bullshit, the military is still struggling against a foe that has no air force, no army and no advanced weapons to speak of.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out the basics about this mess. Leadership sucks and no amount of munitions you throw at them is going to make them happy or change their minds.

People say that, if we pull out, things will get much worse. As things are going at the moment, if we continue to stay there, they will get much worse.

So it's either we stay and things get worse, or we leave and things get worse.

I choose the latter.

colossal failure*

[Tesha]

17. "The loser decides when the war is ove"

As someone (who?) once said:

"It isn't the winner that decides when the war is over,
it's the loser."

As long as a substantial number of the Iraqi people hate our guts and
want us out of their country to the point that they *ARE WILLING TO
DIE FOR THEIR CAUSE*, then we won't be able to control the place, no
matter how many times we declare victory. And it wouldn't matter if
we had phasers and photon torpedoes, we still couldn't control the
place unless we were willing too take the decision to kill every
single Iraqi and Iraqi-sympathiser everywhere in the world.

'Spose it will come to that?

Tesha